5 Tips for Successful Remote Workforce IT Management

An unprecedented crisis is gripping the world today. At the time of this writing, hundreds of thousands are battling a new disease while billions have had to put their normal lives on hold to mitigate the damage COVID-19 could cause. Economies globally are in peril, and businesses are taking immediate steps to flatten out the curve of the impact of this virus. Some have shut a major chunk of their operations while others are leveraging the technology at their disposal and allowing, or even requiring, employees to work remotely.

While switching to a remote workforce is a welcome move, it brings with it a slew of challenges, the biggest being the need to ensure business continuity with minimal loss of productivity. Technology makes this transition feasible; however, given the unexpected magnitude of the situation, transitioning to a remote workforce on a dime has likely caught many businesses off guard, especially small and midsize businesses. It goes without saying that their IT teams and infrastructure are being put to the test during these trying times.

To ensure your business makes it through these turbulent times relatively unscathed, here are five tips to help you manage your remote workforce.

1. Use an endpoint management solution for remote monitoring and management
Now that all of your users are working from home, you need a way to efficiently manage those remote devices. Look for an endpoint management solution that provides remote monitoring and remote control of remote and off-network endpoints. This way your IT team can easily and efficiently access any of these endpoints to troubleshoot issues and maintain uptime.

Endpoint management tools can provide access to these devices without interrupting the user so IT technicians can work behind the scenes. This keeps employee productivity high while allowing the IT team to get things done.

2. Automate many routine IT management tasks
Managing endpoints on a regular basis can be quite a task, especially when you have many manual IT processes. Now, imagine doing that when almost all endpoints of your business have become remote, and none of them can afford to have any downtime. Very few organizations would be capable of handling such a situation smoothly and efficiently using manual processes. Look for an endpoint management solution that allows you to automate many common IT tasks by executing scripts on each endpoint. This will reduce the stress and burden on your IT team in this time of increased workloads.

3. Have a reliable backup and disaster recovery strategy
With the current pandemic creating chaos for everyone, the last thing you should be worrying about is your backup systems. Your backup systems should provide reliable, enterprise-class business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR). Reduce downtime with instant recovery, ransomware detection, and automated disaster recovery testing. An appliance-based DRaaS solution can be integrated into your endpoint management tool, allowing you to manage backups from the same console. Meet the backup demands of the business while using a workflow that is familiar. This will ensure your business data remains safe from any unexpected incidents of data loss or downtime.

4. Back up your SaaS data
Many organizations are now using a number of different Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, such as Microsoft Office 365, Google G Suite and Salesforce, to enable a more mobile and distributed workforce. With this shift to SaaS applications comes the need to have a backup solution that will protect all of your SaaS app data. A loss of this data could really slow down your business at a time when efficiency and productivity are more critical than ever.

5. Protect against a likely increase in cyberattacks
It is especially during a crisis, such as the pandemic the world is facing now, that cybercriminals work double-time to exploit vulnerabilities that can harm your business. These attacks could take place by accessing your compromised credentials on the Dark Web or by orchestrating sophisticated phishing attacks. With the lines between working from home and office blurring, a thorough security assessment, including Dark Web monitoring, should become a priority.

As you look at implementing these steps, you might want to consider a comprehensive IT management solution stack that ticks all these boxes and more. Having disjointed solutions would only add to the trouble, requiring additional effort at a time when your workforce is already being pushed to the limit.

Sailing through these troubled waters isn’t going to be easy, but with the right approach and tools, your business can certainly come out on top when the dust has settled.

ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS

EXTENDED CYBER SECURITY SOFTWARE AND SERVICES

Today’s Cyber Threat Landscape requires an Enterprise Cyber Security Strategy that is multi-layered to provide protection from your network’s edge to the core. In addition to our Fortinet Cyber security partnership, our Cyber Security portfolio enables us to help you identify exploited corporate user credentials, lock down your endpoints with AV/AM software, manage passwords, protect mobile users and even protect the data itself with ransomware –proof data storage. Many of these security solutions are available as on premise or 24×7 managed services.

State and Local Government agencies, Higher Ed and K12 can acquire many of these products and services through our Texas DIR (*), TIPS (**) and BuyBoard Commodity Contracts. Our Cyber Security portfolio includes:

Dedicated Managed Security Services

DarkWeb ID – Dark Web Monitoring Services (**)

This award-winning service combines human and sophisticated Dark Web intelligence with search capabilities to proactively monitor the dark Web, 24×7, for an organization’s compromised or stolen employee and customer data. It quickly alerts you to exploited data so that you can quickly act to remediate current passwords or delete old passwords still connected.to your supply chain and helps meet data governance reporting requirements. Additional services are available for employee anti-phishing training and synthetic phishing attacks to test employee awareness and adoption of anti-phishing policies.

Alert Logic Security Operations Monitoring Services (**)

Alert Logic’s 24×7 SOC provides SIEM, Security Operations Center and Governance services as a service. Its technicians continually monitor your network for vulnerabilities, correlate logs for incident root cause definition and guide your team in problem remediation. In addition, it provides your staff with vital reports to prove your companies compliance with the key government regulations applicable to your company.

Endpoint Security Products

PC Matic Pro Endpoint Suite (**)

Traditional blacklist based endpoint protection depends upon identified threat list and threat signatures. This makes your network vulnerable to new Day Zero cyber threats that have not been identified and protections published. PC Matic Pro Endpoint Suite uses a unique whitelist technology to blocks all unwanted and unsafe programs from executing, keeping your endpoints safer and more reliable. Its SuperShield feature uses advanced heuristics to prevent script-based attacks from leveraging known good windows scripting hosts. Built-in features patch management and driver updates assure the latest application protection against vulnerabilities and keep endpoints running at peak performance to prevent a loss in efficiency.

TrendMicro Endpoint Security Products (**)

In an evolving technological landscape, you need security that goes beyond traditional antivirus. Trend Micro Apex One™ protection offers advanced automated threat detection and response against an ever-growing variety of threats, including fileless and ransomware. Its cross-generational blend of modern techniques provides highly tuned endpoint protection that maximizes performance and protection effectiveness. It offers threat detection, response, and investigation within a single agent to eliminate multiple vendors and consoles and gain deployment flexibility through both SaaS and on-premises deployment options.

Password Management Tools:

Thycotic Secret Server (*, **)

Discover, manage, protect, and audit privileged account access across your organization. As cyber threats continue to increase in volume and sophistication, effective and agile, Privileged Account Management (PAM) has become mission-critical for organizations of every size. Now you can adopt an aggressive privileged account security posture with Secret Server, our enterprise-grade PAM solution available both on premise and in the cloud. Empower your security and IT ops teams to secure and manage all types of privileged accounts quickly and easily.

Thycotic Privilege Manager (*, **)

86% of breaches involve compromised endpoints. They are the most common entry point for threats and your largest attack surface. Companies spend billions on cyber security, yet hackers and disgruntled employees continue breaching systems. Thycotic’s Privilege Manager empowers you to implement a least privilege security posture and implement application control on endpoints, minimizing risks caused by cyber attacks – without disrupting end-users. The executables for unapproved applications, including ransomware and other malware are blocked from operating because they are not listed as approved application son your managed endpoints.

Thycotic Account LifeCycle Manager – Service Account Governance (*, **)

Service accounts abound in every organization and failure to manage them leads to significant risk. These specialized non-human accounts are used by applications or other services to access data and network resources for specific tasks. Because of their “set it and forget it” operation and limited human interaction, service accounts often fly under IT’s radar and rarely get inventoried and controlled. This lack of governance makes service accounts the ideal target for cyber criminals. Thycotic’s Account Lifecycle Manager enables service account governance by automating the lifecycle of service accounts, from workflow-based provisioning to account decommissioning.

Thycotic DevOps Secrets Management (*, **)

Rapid, iterative DevOps workflows often expose many security vulnerabilities directly tied to privilege management. Every container, server, and application can have privileged access, dramatically expanding the attack surface for intruders looking for an entry point, and the growth of robotic process automation (RPA) further expands those entry points. It’s difficult to balance high-speed, dynamic DevOps practices and RPA deployments with necessary security policies. Thycotic’s DevOps Secrets Vault automates secrets management to provide DevOps teams the speed and agility needed to stay productive without sacrificing security.

WatchGuard Authpoint Multifactor Authentication (*, **)

WatchGuard’s AuthPoint service is the right solution at the right time to provide effective authentication on an easy-to-use Cloud platform. MFA provides the strongest approach to user identification – requiring users to supply information they know, with information provided on something they have, to positively identify a specific person. With a simple push notification, the AuthPoint mobile app makes each login attempt visible, allowing the user to accept or block access right from their smartphone.

WatchGuard DNSWatchGo -DNS-Level Protection for Users on the Go (*,**)

Whether working from a home office, coffee shop, or conference hotel room, the modern employee relishes the opportunity to be productive where they feel most comfortable. Today, three-quarters of global employees work remotely at least one day a week. As a result, more and more of your business is being conducted off-network, and outside of your traditional security tools. WatchGuard DNSWatchGO provides DNS-level protection and content filtering that keeps your business safe from phishing, ransomware, and other attacks even when your user is outside of the network, without requiring a VPN.

StorageCraft ShadowProtect – Server Replication Software (**)

Like disasters, IT environments are anything but standard. That’s why businesses need a single cross-platform solution that protects a mixed, hybrid environment. ShadowProtect® backup and disaster recovery software ensures on-prem business systems and data are fully protected and always available. ShadowProtect enables you to meet or beat your recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTOs and RPOs). In the event of a server failure or ransomware infection, ShadowProtect enables you to restore server files and folders in minutes by using its patented VirtualBoot technology to instantly boot a backup image into a virtual machine and continue working in a matter of minutes. Then when healthy server hardware is available, ShadowProtect facilitates a bare metal restoration.

Kalispell Regional Healthcare Provides Notification of Data Security Event

Despite being named in the top quartile for data security readiness by a third party firm, Kalispell Regional Healthcare (KRH) was recently a victim of a highly sophisticated attack on our information technology systems. Safeguarding our patients and their personal information is a top priority, and we want our community to be aware of what happened and how we have addressed it.

This summer we discovered that several employees were victims of a well-designed email that led them to unknowingly provide their KRH login credentials to malicious criminals. We immediately disabled the employees’ accounts, notified federal law enforcement, and launched an investigation, which was performed by a nationally recognized digital forensics firm, to determine whether any personal information was affected. On August 28, 2019, we learned that some patients’ personal information may have been accessed without authorization. A deeper investigation specifically determined which patients’ information may have been accessed as early as May 24, 2019.

Different information may have been involved for each person. The information may have involved a patient’s name, Social Security number, address, medical record number, date of birth, telephone number, email address, medical history and treatment information, date of service, treating/referring physician, medical bill account number and/or health insurance information.

Although there is no indication that the information was misused, we have mailed notification letters to potentially-impacted patients to make them aware of the event and the steps they can take to protect their information. All notified patients are being offered complimentary fraud consultation and identity theft restoration services. In addition, the notification letters may also offer affected individuals 12 months of web and/or credit monitoring services at no charge, depending on what information was involved for that individual. In addition, we have taken further steps to revise procedures that will minimize the risk of a similar event from happening again.

Carrying any activity smoothly has become possible in today’s digital world. The network cabling installation is certainly responsible for it. There are many companies that rely on cabling services to increase their competency while improving the task of activating their daily routine. Linking with the exterior infrastructure is easy for the firms, and it had become possible because of the cabling service providers.

Fortunately, the cabling services through network cabling companies have come up as a boon for any organization. Now, computer, Internet, printer, other hardware devices can be connected to one another in any organization.

Why you hire network cabling services

Accept it or not, a good network cabling system is essential to run your business in a smooth manner. Since there are a lot of cabling service providers available in the marketplace, the task of building a network cabling structure is no longer tricky.

In today’s time, there are a lot of companies that specialize in cabling installation services. Therefore, you have a long list of services offered by the reputed cabling service providers now. Read on to learn more about their services.

1. Cabling service

Cabling service makes it easy to reduce cost, save time and improve the overall productivity of a company while speeding up the data transfer. Now, organizing and maintaining a procedure in an organization has become somewhat convenient.

2. Carrier service

It may not be easy to look at your Internet, telephone, cable company bills, contract, and services. This will not only consume your time but also bring a lot of confusion. Now, you can hire a cabling service provider to the job for you. The service provider brings an appropriate solution for your cable service needs.

3. Managed service

Optimizing the IT environment and monitoring or preparing for an emergency issue that requires immediate attention is now possible with managed service of cabling service providers. Their technicians will assist you with IT tasks and fix the errors that may cause you major harm. Now, dealing with day-to-day operations is no longer difficult for you.

4. Professional service

To run your business in a smooth manner and implementation of services in a smooth manner, you might need to hire a professional. The communication, network, security and maintenance service for your organization would be necessary. Instead of getting confused and being stuck in an unwanted situation, you should go for cabling service providers that offer professional services to operate your business in a convenient manner.

Planning is indeed an important step to take when you want to run a venture successfully. Efficient methods to ensure smooth operations would be necessary to avoid significant harms in the future. To make sure all the issues related to IT services are addressed, you can rely on cabling services providers without any doubt.

It is true that no one likes to face major harm when it comes to network cabling installation. In fact, maximizing the overall profit can be easy if you go for a reputed cabling service provider. But, before you hire one, be sure to look for the services they provide should meet your needs and goals.

Recover Your Data with StorageCraft OneXafe Continuous Immutable Snapshots

Ransomware threats continue to evolve and infect businesses, government, power companies, education and even hospitals. In 2018, an estimated $8 Billion in ransom was paid to anonymous attackers. The statistics are shocking, ransomware attacks on businesses are up 365% from Q2 2018 to Q2 20192. They are becoming more targeted, sophisticated, and successful at penetration. Unfortunately, many ransomware attacks continue to infiltrate despite the use of state-of-the-art prevention methods. In fact, 77% of organizations infected with ransomware were running up-to-date endpoint protection.

Ransomware can encrypt your files making it impossible to use them. The malware may lay dormant for weeks and may even delete your backups prior to the attack leaving you without a way to recover and forcing you to pay or lose your data.

StorageCraft OneXafe Continuous Immutable Snapshots to the Rescue

StorageCraft OneXafe storage protects your data with continuous immutable snapshots, every 90 seconds, so you’ll never have to worry again. An immutable snapshot is a copy of your data that simply cannot be overwritten or deleted by ransomware or users, because OneXafe and its patented distributed object store prevent that from happening. You can recover anytime, every time, making OneXafe the most effective protection in the market. Furthermore, OneXafe performs powerful inline deduplication on the continuous snapshots, reducing the data footprint.

Storage vendors claim their snapshots are immutable because it is simply read-only and cannot be changed. However this doesn’t protect the snapshot from being deleted or the snapshot volume from filling up. If your snapshots can be deleted and/or modified, are they truly immutable?

Enterprise Systems Corporation has the expertise to implement the StorageCraft OneXafe solution so you never have to worry again about ransomware.  Contact us today for more information.